The Conceptual Image

The Conceptual Image

Sensing that traditional narrative design did not report the wants of the times, post–World War I graphic designers reinvented the forthcoming image to express the engine age and progressive graphic ideas. In alike task for new imagery, the periods after World War II saw the expansion of the abstract image in graphic design. Images transported not merely story information but ideas and concepts. Mental content joined perceived content as theme. The illustrator understanding a writer’s text produced to the graphic imagist making a report. A new type of image maker was worried with the total plan of the space and the integration of word and picture. In the exploding information culture of the second half of the twentieth century, the entire past of visual arts was available to the graphic artist as a library of possible methods and pictures. In particular, motivation was gained from the advances of twentieth-century art movements, the spatial shapes of cubism, the juxtapositions, displacements, and scale variations of surrealism, the pure color undone from natural position by expressionism and fauvism, and the recycling of mass-media pictures by pop art. In the decades following World War II, graphic artists had greater chance for self-expression, produced more personal images, and founded individual styles and methods. The old fashioned boundaries among the fine arts and public visual communications became hazy.

The creation of conceptual pictures developed a significant design approach in Poland, Germany, the United States, and even Cuba. It also cropped up around the whole world in the work of individuals whose quest for relevant and effective images in the post–World War II era led them near the abstract image.

 

Armando Testa, poster for                                                

Pirelli, 1954. The strength of a bull

elephant is bestowed on the tire by

the surrealist technique of image

combination.

  

Armando Testa, rubber and

plastics exhibition poster, 1972. A

synthetic hand holds a plastic ball in a

distinctive and appropriate image for

this trade exhibition.

In the most unique work of the Italian graphic designer Armando Testa, for example, metaphysical mixtures were used to convey essential truths about the subject. Testa was an abstract painter until after the war, when he established a graphic design studio in his native Turin. His 1950s publicity movements for Pirelli tires had a global impact on graphic design rational Testa borrowed the language of surrealism by joining the image of a tire with immediately familiar symbols. In his posters and ads, the image is the main means of communication, and he reduces the vocal content to a few words or just the creation name. Testa effectively used more subtle flaws, such as images made of artificial materials as a means of inserting unexpected elements into graphic design.

Bibliography:

·        Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

·        Testa | sitographics. 2015. Testa | sitographics. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.sitographics.it/imagini_testa.html. [Accessed 30 January 2015].